The Balance of power in world history

The Balance of Power in

World History

Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and

William C. Wohlforth

Edited by

The Balance of Power in World History

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Also by Stuart J. Kaufman

MODERN HATREDS: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War

Also by Richard Little

THE ANARCHICAL SOCIETY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD (co-editor with John

Williams)

THE BALANCE OF POWER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

BELIEF SYSTEMS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (co-editor with Steve Smith)

GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND WORLD ORDER (co-author with R.D. Mckinlay)

INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS IN WORLD HISTORY (co-author with Barry Buzan)

INTERVENTION: EXTERNAL INVOLVEMENT IN CIVIL WAR

ISSUES IN WORLD POLITICS (3rd edition) (co-editor with Brian White and

Michael Smith)

THE LOGIC OF ANARCHY (co-author with Barry Buzan and Charles A. Jones)

PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD POLITICS (3rd edition) (co-editor with Michael Smith)

Also by William C. Wohlforth

COLD WAR ENDGAME (editor)

ELUSIVE BALANCE AND PERCEPTIONS IN THE COLD WAR

WITNESSES TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR (editor)

WORLD OUT OF BALANCE: International Relations Theory and the Challenge

of American Primacy (co-author with Stephen G. Brooks)

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The Balance of Power in

World History

Edited by

Stuart J. Kaufman

Department of Political Science and International Relations

University of Delaware, USA

Richard Little

Department of Politics

University of Bristol, UK

and

William C. Wohlforth

Department of Government

Dartmouth College, USA

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Editorial matter, selection, introduction and conclusion © Stuart

J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William C. Wohlforth 2007

All remaining chapters © respective authors

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence

permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90

Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this

work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2007 by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The balance of power in world history / edited by Stuart J. Kaufman,

Richard Little, William C. Wohlforth.

p. cm.

Papers presented at a workshop on Hierarchy and Balance in

International Systems held at Dartmouth College, October 18–20, 2003.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-230-50710-7 (alk. paper)

1. Balance of power – History – Congresses. 2. International relations –

History – Congresses. I. Kaufman, Stuart J. II. Little, Richard, 1944–

III. Wohlforth, William Curti, 1959–

JZ1313.B34 2007

327.1′1209–dc22 2007021646

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16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

List of Tables and Maps vii

Acknowledgments viii

Biographies ix

1 Introduction: Balance and Hierarchy in International

Systems 1

William C. Wohlforth, Stuart J. Kaufman and Richard Little

2 Balancing and Balancing Failure in Biblical Times:

Assyria and the Ancient Middle Eastern System,

900–600 BCE 22

Stuart J. Kaufman and William C. Wohlforth

3 The Greek City-States in the Fifth Century BCE:

Persia and the Balance of Power 47

Richard Little

4 Intra-Greek Balancing, the Mediterranean Crisis

of c. 201–200 BCE, and the Rise of Rome 71

Arthur M. Eckstein

5 The Forest and the King of Beasts: Hierarchy and Opposition

in Ancient India (c. 600–232 BCE) 99

William J. Brenner

6 The Triumph of Domination in the Ancient Chinese System 122

Victoria Tin-bor Hui

7 ‘A Republic for Expansion’: The Roman Constitution

and Empire and Balance-of-Power Theory 148

Daniel Deudney

8 Hierarchy and Resistance in American State-Systems

1400–1800 CE 176

Charles A. Jones

9 Stability and Hierarchy in East Asian International Relations,

1300–1900 CE 199

David C. Kang

v

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10 Conclusion: Theoretical Insights from the Study of

World History 228

Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William C. Wohlforth

Appendix A 247

Bibliography 250

Index 273

vi Contents

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List of Tables and Maps

Tables

2.1 Summary of Balancing Behavior in Key Periods 42

9.1 East Asian Political Systems, 1200–1900 202

9.2 Per Capita Levels of Industrialization (UK in 1900=100) 205

9.3 Relative Shares of World Manufacturing (in percentages) 206

9.4 Quantities of Tribute During the Ming Era 208

9.5 Chinese Data for Ships Visiting Japan, 1641–1683 209

9.6 Japanese Silver Exports, 1648–1672 210

9.7 East Asia and Europe over the Last Six Centuries 215

10.1 Frequency in Decades of Different System Polarities 231

Maps

Map 2.1 The Assyrian Empire, c. 860 BCE 24

Map 2.2 The Assyrian Empire, c. 730 BCE 34

Map 2.3 The Assyrian Empire, c. 705 BCE 36

Map 2.4 The Assyrian Empire, c. 640 BCE 39

Map 5.1 Northeast Indian Kingdoms and Republics,

c. 600–450 BCE 105

Map 6.1 Ancient China in the Middle to Late Spring and

Autumn Period 124

Map 6.2 Ancient China, c. 450 BCE 125

Map 6.3 Ancient China, c. 350 BCE 126

Map 6.4 Ancient China, c. 257 BCE 127

vii

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Acknowledgments

This volume is the product of a workshop on Hierarchy and Balance in

International Systems that took place at Dartmouth College, October

18–20, 2003. We are grateful to the Department of Government for

hosting the workshop and to the John Sloan Dickey Center for

International Understanding for sponsoring the workshop.

viii

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Biographies

William J. Brenner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of

Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor of political science at Johns

Hopkins University. His most recent book is Bounding Power: Republican

Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007).

Arthur M. Eckstein is Professor of History at the University of Maryland

at College Park. He is the author of three books, an edited book, and

some 45 articles, mostly dealing with Roman imperial expansion under

the Republic, and Greek perceptions of that phenomenon, but ranging

into the ancient historical foundations of political science – and as far

afield as American culture in the 1950s. His latest book is Mediterranean

Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (2006).

Victoria Tin-bor Hui is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at

the University of Notre Dame. She is author of War and State Formation

in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (2005), which won the

2006 Jervis-Schroeder Award from the American Political Science

Association and the 2005 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award from the

Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security

Studies.

Charles A. Jones studied philosophy and history at Cambridge.

Originally a specialist in the political history of international business

he taught international political economy at the University of Warwick

before moving to Cambridge to teach international relations theory in

1998.

David C. Kang is Associate Professor of Government, and Adjunct

Associate Professor and Research Director at the Center for International

Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Kang is author of

China Reshapes East Asia: Power, Politics, and Ideas in International

Relations (forthcoming). He received an A.B. with honors from Stanford

University and his Ph.D. from Berkeley.

ix

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Stuart J. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science and International

Relations at the University of Delaware. His previous book is entitled,

Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (2001).

Richard Little is Professor of International Politics at the University of

Bristol. He is a former editor of the Review of International Studies and a

former president of the British International Studies Association. He is

the co-author with Barry Buzan of International Systems in World History

(2000). His most recent book is The Balance of Power in International

Relations: Metaphors, Myths, and Models (2007).

William C. Wohlforth is Professor of Government at Dartmouth

College. He is the author of Elusive Balance and Perceptions in the Cold

War (1993) and editor of Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (1996) and

Cold War Endgame (2002).

x Biographies

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1

1

Introduction: Balance and

Hierarchy in International Systems

William C. Wohlforth, Stuart J. Kaufman and Richard Little

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in inter￾national relations (IR). No theoretical concept has been the subject of

as much scholarly inquiry and none is more likely to fall from the lips

of foreign policy analysts and practitioners. This continued fascination

with the balance of power is understandable, for it appears as central to

scholarly debates about the basic properties of international systems as

it is to policy debates over responses to US primacy in the early

21st century. Yet it has never been systemically and comprehensively

examined in premodern or non-European contexts – and therefore it

has never been considered in the context of previous cases of unipolar￾ity. Balance-of-power theory and policy analysis thus rest on pro￾foundly unbalanced empirical foundations. Almost everything we

think we know about the balance of power is the product of modern

European history and the global experience of the 20th and early

21st centuries.

This book redresses this imbalance. We present eight new case

studies of balancing and balancing failure in premodern and non￾European international systems. Our collective, multidisciplinary and

international research effort yields an inescapable conclusion: much of

the conventional wisdom about the balance of power does not survive

contact with non-European evidence.

Given the foundational role of balance-of-power thinking in the evo￾lution of the academic study of international relations, it is vital to be

clear about the specific aspects addressed here. Fifty years after Ernst

Haas (1953) identified eight different definitions of ‘balance of power,’

the concept remains so fiercely contested that the unmodified term is

too ambiguous to be meaningful. To clarify our goal, some explanation

is needed.

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Consider this deceptively simple statement from the 2002 United

States National Security Strategy document: ‘We seek … to create a

balance of power that favors human freedom’ (Bush, 2002). Haas

(1953) identified four different ways of using the ‘balance of power,’

and all four are apparent here. First, as is made clearer elsewhere in the

document, the statement is descriptive, identifying an international dis￾tribution of power in which the United States is the dominant state.

Second, it is prescriptive, indicating that this particular state of affairs

(American pre-eminence) should be maintained. Third, it is normative

or propagandistic associating American pre-eminence with the moral

good (human freedom). Finally, it is implicitly analytical, with the

‘balance of power’ representing the central mechanism in the opera￾tion of the international system; that is it assumes that creating ‘a

balance of power that favors human freedom’ is the critical step in pro￾moting the goal of freedom. These different uses of the phrase are

usually intertwined because for propagandistic purposes they are mutu￾ally dependent, even though they are analytically distinct.

The element of propaganda is very evident in Bush’s use of balance

of power terminology because he wants to convince his audience that

all the great powers favor freedom and have formed a grand coalition

against those elements of the international system that are opposed to

freedom. It follows that the other great powers should not be con￾cerned about US pre-eminence or by its decision to enhance its capabil￾ities because they are all part of a common coalition. Unsurprisingly,

other great powers do not share this assessment. For some of them,

American pre-eminence represents a serious problem with the estab￾lished balance of power. The French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine

asserted in 1999, for example, that ‘the entire foreign policy of

France…is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of

several poles, not just one’ (cited in Walt, 2002).

What makes the debate about the balance of power so complex is

that scholars, like statesmen, are also in dispute about what is meant

by the balance of power. Some scholars, as Haas (1953) noted, consider

‘the balance of power’ to be virtually identical with the notion of

power politics or with the international struggle for power – in short,

they consider it identical to realism. Other complications arise when

the focus is on the contemporary system because unipolarity is such a

recent development and indeed is often regarded as unique in the

modern world Some realists worry, for example, that US unilateralism

is now fragmenting the putative grand coalition in favor of freedom.

Though there is no consensus amongst the great powers in favor of

2 The Balance of Power in World History

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‘hard balancing’ the United States by establishing a countervailing mil￾itary alliance, it is argued that there is now evidence of the great

powers agreeing on less extreme measures to encourage the United

States to rein in its unilateralism – a phenomenon described as ‘soft

balancing’ (see, e.g., Pape, 2005; Paul, 2005).

Critics, however, argue that this move represents what Giovanni

Sartori (1970) dubbed ‘concept misformation’ or ‘concept stretching’ –

essentially, stretching a term to refer to a phenomenon entirely dis￾tinct from the one it previously meant. As Lieber and Alexander (2005)

note, behaviors labeled ‘soft balancing’ are fundamentally different

from traditional balancing, and are instead ‘identical to traditional

diplomatic friction’. From the critics’ point of view, the underlying

logical error is to conflate balance-of-power theory’s analytical insight

(balancing tends to occur) with a particular descriptive position (that

must be what is happening now). Balance of power terminology is par￾ticularly prone to such concept stretching because the term was already

so elastic and diverse in meaning, but such stretching creates the risk

of turning the concept into what British statesman Richard Cobden

labeled it almost two centuries ago: ‘a chimera: It is not a fallacy, a

mistake, an imposture – it is an undescribed, indescribable, incompre￾hensible nothing’ (quoted in Haas, 1953: 443).

The aim of this book

Once we distinguish among these uses of the term balance of power, the

purpose of this book can be stated succinctly: to assess the central analyt￾ical and descriptive claims of systemic balance-of-power theory. Haas

(1953: 449–50) notes that some scholars, such as Spykman (1942), use

‘balance of power’ descriptively (as the Bush Administration did for pro￾paganda reasons) to refer to a ‘balance of power’ in favor of some state –

in other words, to refer to some form of hegemony. That is clearly the

minority position however; for most American scholars trained in the

Cold War era it refers descriptively to equilibrium, or relative equality of

power between two or more states. Analytically, according to a careful

review by Levy, the core notion of balance-of-power theory is ‘that hege￾monies do not form in multistate systems because perceived threats of

hegemony over the system generate balancing behavior by other leading

states in the system’ (Levy, 2004: 37). Theory based on this notion is the

one we term systemic balance-of-power theory.

We focus on systemic balance-of-power theory because of its central

importance to international relations theory and practice. As Levy and

William C. Wohlforth, Stuart J. Kaufman and Richard Little 3

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Thompson note in another review, its central claim ‘has been one of

the most widely held propositions in the field of international rela￾tions’ (2005: 1–2). Indeed, the assumption – made most explicitly in

Waltz’s seminal Theory of International Politics (1979), but widely held

by realists (Levy, 2004; Levy and Thompson, 2005) – is that this propo￾sition is universally valid across time and space. Furthermore, this view

that balance is the historical norm is the source of the widespread

expectation, among scholars and practitioners alike, that states will

soon begin balancing against the United States; and of the assessment,

most starkly stated by Waltz (2000a: 56), that ‘the present condition of

international politics is unnatural.’ Even liberal institutionalists and

constructivists (Nye, 2003; Lebow, 2004), when arguing for restraint in

US foreign policy, cite the expectation of counterbalancing by other

states as a reason for their prescription.

The purpose of this study is therefore to test the logic and universal￾ity of balance-of-power theory against premodern evidence: the analyt￾ical statement that hegemonic threats tend to evoke balancing

behavior as the dominant response in international systems; and the

descriptive statement that ‘balances’ of power (as distinct from hege￾monic or unipolar distributions of power) are as a result the most

common state of international systems. Nicholas Spykman and George

Bush notwithstanding, we distinguish theories of hegemony as com￾peting with theories of balance. Far from attacking realism, however,

these analyses offer an assessment of balance-of-power theory largely

from within the realist paradigm, assessing how, why and how fre￾quently the alternative outcomes of balance and hegemony have

historically emerged.

‘Balance of power’ theories that assert that the balance is associated

either with peace or with war represent an entirely different literature that

we do not address here. Again, Haas (1953) notes that both claims have a

long pedigree. Both have been examined recently in a literature pitting an

application of Organski’s power transition theory (Organski and Kugler,

1980) to all state dyads (associating dyadic imbalances of power with

peace) against the ‘balance of power’ assertion that parity in power is

associated with peace for all state dyads (see, e.g., Tammen et al., 2000;

Lemke, 2002; Moul, 2002). While we have doubts about the appropriate￾ness of applying the balance-of-power idea in this way, we merely note

here that such an application constitutes a fundamentally different

theory from the ones we examine, considering a different dependent vari￾able (peace rather than balance) and a different independent variable

(dyadic rather than systemic distribution of capabilities).

4 The Balance of Power in World History

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